Experience Catalysts And Architecture Towards a New Tradition

Presented at: Future traditions: rethinking traditions and envisioning the future in architecture through the use of digital technologies, Porto, Portugal, April, 2013

Porto: Porto: FAUP Publicações, 2013

This paper describes two research projects in the field of interactive architecture, both examples of experience catalysts; Settings which allow new insights in the aesthetic constitution and perception of environments. This term can be thought of as somewhat synonymous with artistic intervention, but is used instead to recognize that the participants might not self-identify as artists. We are working with architectural notions of space and place, but are interested in the experience of place more than its formal structure. We wish to emphasize the dynamic and are interested in transitions not as the pauses between states but as destinations worth exploring. Quadricone by Selena Savic is an actual experience catalyst: a physical manifestation of a digital “material” (in this case network traffic.) The goal is less data visualization and more an attempt to understand what it means to physically experience something normally invisible. Inter-Actor by Andrew Sempere casts architecture as an ongoing event which might benefit from the flexibility of the digital. The idea is to create a combination of software and hardware that allows for “rapid prototyping” of interactive space. Inter-Actor is not an experience catalyst but a toolkit for creating them.